members of my family who are highly intelligent, strong-willed people. Who were just overpowered by the strength of alcohol.
I would look at them and couldn't figure out why they just couldn't stop.
It's not alcohol in of itself. The real strenght of addiction lies in our own susceptibility to addiction. Alcohol is a mere catalyst, albeit a strong one. Your last sentence describes all addicts, including gambling addicts, sex addicts and all behavioral addictions alike, which do not have psychotropic or psychoactive biological agents. No chemical agent acting as a catalyst to abnormal highs.
The true way to understand addictions is by recognizing its self-soothing nature related to developmental problems with emotional self-regulation.
Addiction is a very complicated subject with a broad range of confounding causal factors, from genes, epigene markings, childhood experiences, especially related to attachment-reward caregiver relationships with the development of emotional self-regulation, but above all, traumatic childhood experiences that range from physical abuse to simple emotional neglect of many types.
I'll end with a salient example of this relationship, an experiment by Bruce Alexander called Rat Park. Now Rat park has had its critics, but the whole problem with the criticism is not recognizing how Rat Park was simply a more intricate reimagining of a series of previously well-recognized experiments on rats with Marian Diamond's seminal work that led to the birth of the expression "neuroplasticity".
Long story short, a few decades ago everyone thought the chemicals in drugs were the main cause of addiction. To prove this, rats were put into simple small cages, often either alone or in pairs and were given a choice between fresh water or water laced with cocaine. Most rats died of their addictions. Proof was made.
The whole problem with that is there was already work done that showed the major methodological problems with those expirements. The aforementioned Dr Diamond had set-up experiments conclusively showing how a rat's upbringing and social life had a huge impact on neurobiological development.
So Alexander, aware of Diamond's work, came up with Rat Park. Instead of isolating one or two rats into a simple cage with the bare minimum, he created a large cage with everything a rat could dream of. A tunnel maze, wheels and other rat attractions, food, but most importantly, enough space and aminities for a whole bunch of rats. Heroin laced water and regular fresh water. Know what happened? Barely any rat died of addiction. Because like us, rats are social creatures.
More addictions in society is a symptom of a deteriorating social environment.
All this shows is that b good leadership isn’t worth much and doesn’t matter much on the statline or the standings.
